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Sunday, June 3, 2018

Breaking News: Trump Fact or Fiction? - "We Report...You Decide"

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AP FACT CHECK: Fabrications of Trump and his critics

Trump in this May 29, 2018

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump fabricated history when it
came to assessing the 2016 election, his achievements on the opioid
epidemic and a congressman's voting record on taxes. Critics of his
immigration policy got it wrong when they accused the Trump
administration of taking 1,500 immigrant children from their parents and
losing them.

The week in review:

TRUMP: "African-Americans vote for Democrats for the most part. You
know, vast majority. They've been doing it for over 100 years." —
Nashville rally Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Not 100 years or
anything close. Most African-Americans for much of U.S. history were
disenfranchised, then prevented from voting until the 1965 Voting Rights
Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in voting. Before then, those
who could vote mostly backed Republicans until the 1932 election of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal programs of economic
relief helped spur a longer-term shift of black support from Republican
to Democrat.

TRUMP: "Some of these states, I won by 44 points." — Nashville rally.

THE FACTS: Not some. One. He won Wyoming with 70 percent of the vote
in 2016, exceeding Hillary Clinton's 22 percent by nearly 48 points,
according to Associated Press election data. His next biggest win came
in West Virginia, where he won by 42 points.

Nationwide, Trump lost the
popular vote. He garnered 46 percent to Clinton's 48 percent, but
ultimately won the election based on an Electoral College system in
which the votes of smaller rural states that generally backed Trump are
weighted more heavily than big, Democratic-leaning states such as New
York and California.

Under the U.S. system of electing presidents, Electoral College votes
are set equal to the number of U.S. representatives in each state plus
its two senators.

TRUMP: "A.P. has just reported that the Russian Hoax Investigation
has now cost our government over $17 million, and going up fast. No
Collusion, except by the Democrats!" — tweet Friday.

THE FACTS: The AP did not report
the cost is going up fast. It cited a Justice Department finding that
the investigation over 10 months has cost $16.7 million, which Trump
rounded up to $17 million. Of the costs assigned to the investigation,
$9 million would have been spent even absent the investigation, the
department said.

TRUMP: "Not that it matters but I
never fired James Comey because of Russia! The Corrupt Mainstream Media
loves to keep pushing that narrative, but they know it is not true!" —
tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Trump himself fed
that "narrative." The president has said at least twice that Comey's
firing in May 2017 was related to the FBI's investigation into whether
Trump's campaign associates coordinated with Russia in an effort to sway
the 2016 election. And his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told Fox News in May
that Trump fired Comey because the FBI director wouldn't publicly state
that Trump "wasn't a target" of the Russia investigation. Trump's public
rationale for firing Comey has shifted on multiple occasions.

TRUMP, referring to Robert Iger, CEO of ABC's parent Walt Disney Co.:
"Iger, where is my call of apology? You and ABC have offended millions
of people, and they demand a response. How is Brian Ross doing? He
tanked the market with an ABC lie, yet no apology. Double Standard!" —
tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: "No apology" is wrong. Trump should know that because he
expressed satisfaction in December with ABC's statement that said, "We
deeply regret and apologize for the serious error" by Ross, an
investigative reporter.

Ross had reported that Trump, as
a candidate, directed aide Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian
officials during the campaign, a potentially explosive development. Ross
changed his report hours later, saying his source stated that Trump's
outreach actually came after Trump won the election, when
presidents-elect might be expected to get to know foreign officials. ABC
issued the apology, suspended Ross for four weeks without pay and said
he would no longer report on Trump.

At the time, that pleased Trump, who tweeted: "Congratulations to
@ABC News for suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and
dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt. More Networks
and 'papers' should do the same with their Fake News!"

Trump's revived wrath at ABC and Iger comes after the network
canceled Roseanne Barr's show because of her racist tweet about Valerie
Jarrett, who was an aide to President Barack Obama. Iger tweeted that
the cancellation was "the right thing" to do.

TRUMP: "There is no one better
to represent the people of N.Y. and Staten Island (a place I know very
well) than @RepDanDonovan, who is strong on Borders & Crime, loves
our Military & our Vets, voted for Tax Cuts and is helping me to
Make America Great Again. Dan has my full endorsement!" — tweet
Wednesday.

THE FACTS: He's incorrect about
the tax cuts he signed into law in December. Donovan voted against them,
one of the few Republicans to do so. He told AP on Thursday that Trump
knew that. "The president was well aware," he said. "We've had
discussions about my tax vote, the president and I." Donovan opposed the
tax bill because he said it would mean a tax increase for his
constituents. "With the state and local tax deduction nearly eliminated,
this tax bill doesn't equal relief for far too many New Yorkers," he
said at the time.

TRUMP, sharing this tweet from
broadcaster Rush Limbaugh: "If the FBI was so concerned, and if they
weren't targeting Trump, they should have told Trump. If they were
really concerned about the Russians infiltrating a campaign (hoax), then
why not try to stop it? Why not tell Trump? Because they were pushing
this scam." — Thursday.

THE FACTS: The FBI did tell the Trump campaign about threats posed by
foreign intelligence services. What level of detail it disclosed has
not been established. It is now well known that Trump aides had multiple
contacts with Russian interests during the campaign and the FBI was
investigating those contacts for any evidence of collusion between the
campaign and Russia. It is therefore unlikely that the FBI would share
specifics that might compromise its criminal investigation.

In August 2016, an FBI
counterintelligence agent gave candidate Trump what is known within the
bureau as a defensive briefing about the threats from foreign
intelligence services. Such briefings are fairly standard and are
intended to help campaigns guard against infiltration or hacking by
foreign governments, such as Russia and China. Similar briefings were
given to Clinton and the two vice presidential picks prior to the
election, according to an October 2017 letter from Greg Brower, then the
FBI's head of congressional affairs.

TRUMP: "We got $6 billion for
opioid and getting rid of that scourge that's taking over our country.
And the numbers are way down. We're getting the word out — bad. Bad
stuff. You go to the hospital, you have a broken arm, you come out,
you're a drug addict with this crap. It's way down. We're doing a good
job with it. But we got $6 billion to help us with opioid." — Nashville
rally.

THE FACTS: That's misleading. One leading indicator of the opioid
epidemic is down — painkiller prescriptions. Other indicators are up,
such as the number of overdoses and deaths. And none of that has to do
with the $6 billion enacted by Congress. The numbers are from 2017; the
money is for this year and next.

Prescriptions for opioid painkillers filled in the U.S. fell almost 9
percent last year, the largest drop in 25 years. The total dosage of
opioid prescriptions filled in 2017 declined by 12 percent because more
prescriptions were for a shorter duration, fewer new patients started on
them and high-dose prescriptions dropped. The numbers are from health
data firm IQVIA's Institute for Human Data Science.

But overdose deaths involving
opioids rose to about 46,000 for the 12-month period ended October 2017,
up about 15 percent from October 2016, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. The numbers are preliminary because of
continuing cause-of-death investigations later in the reporting period.
They could go higher.

As well, the CDC says emergency department visits for overdoses of
opioids rose 30 percent in the U.S. from July 2016 to September 2017.
Overdoses shot up 70 percent in the Midwest in that time while
increasing by 54 percent in large cities in 16 states.

TRUMP: "Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama's term
showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was
recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires." — tweet
Tuesday.

THE FACTS: He is correct about widespread misrepresentation of the photos on Twitter.

The photos, taken by AP, were
from 2014, during the Obama administration, but were presented by
liberal activists as if they showed the effects of Trump's immigration
policy now. The photos were taken at a center run by the Customs and
Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two
unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. It's not clear
that many prominent Democrats spread the photos, from a 2016 Arizona
Republic story, though some did.

Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor now running
for governor, tweeted that he was: "Speechless. This is not who we are
as a nation." Jon Favreau, ex-speechwriter for Obama, tweeted: "This is
happening right now." They and others deleted their tweets when they
realized the mistake.

JIM CARREY, actor: "1500
innocent children ripped from their mothers' arms at our border. Lost in
Trump's 'system'. — tweet May 27.

THE FACTS: This didn't happen. Many Trump critics, Carrey among them,
misrepresented the fate of nearly 1,500 minors who came to the border —
without their parents — and were transferred by U.S. authorities to
sponsors in the country.

The Health and Human Services Department followed up with such
children by calling their households to check on them late last year,
getting information on the whereabouts of most, officials said. But they
could not account for 1,475 of them, in part because many sponsors
didn't respond to the calls.

On that basis, Trump critics are calling the children "lost." But in
that round of calls, the Trump administration actually had a slightly
better rate of confirming such children's circumstances than the Obama
administration did in 2016, according to an inspector general's report —
86 percent versus 85 percent.

The episode with the
unaccompanied children and the 2014 photos distracted from what is
actually happening. Under a Trump policy to enforce criminal charges
against people crossing the border illegally with few or no previous
offenses, separation of parents from children is bound to become more
common, and that trend may have started.

A Customs and Border Protection official told lawmakers that 658
children had been separated from their parents at the border from May 6
to May 19, after border agents began referring every illegal entry to
criminal prosecutors. This is in addition to hundreds more who were
estimated to have been removed from their parents at the border since
October.

Associated Press writers Anne Flaherty and Chad Day in Washington, Mike
Stobbe in New York, Carla K. Johnson in Seattle and Elliot Spagat in San
Diego contributed to this report.

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